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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, dull people. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming native, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy elderly stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.